Office 365 is now the most popular enterprise app

Last week, Okta announced that Office 365 has overtaken Salesforce as the most popular enterprise cloud application. In the past year, Office 365 has managed to overtake Google Apps, Dropbox and now finally, Salesforce, to become the most used application after usage has ‘skyrocketed’.

It looks set to continue gaining with a recent study from BitGlass showing that "Office 365 has surged ahead of Google in the enterprise and is dominating future enterprise deployment plans (29%) versus Google Apps (13%).

The below chart shows the how Microsoft Office 365 and Google App usage compares dependent on company size and we can see that Office 365 is consistently the popular choice, especially with larger enterprises.

With the continuing reliance on technology for businesses and the growing features of Office 365, we expect that the number of smaller businesses that choose Office 365 will also rise.

Why Office 365?

Businesses choose Office 365 for many reasons but we believe some of the most popular motives are:

Email – Businesses love using Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for their email, and when looking to upgrade or move to Exchange it can be a strategic and cost effective decision to move to Office 365 instead. As well as offering business class email, users also receive the Office suite, Yammer, SharePoint, Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business (cloud storage) – often being a most cost effective way of licensing while also gaining a wealth of useful applications.

Familiarity – Microsoft Office 365 includes many applications users are already familiar with and enjoy using, such as Outlook, Word and Excel as well as new applications that follow Microsoft’s intuitive style. This allows businesses to give their employee’s access to Office 365 and not always need to give any training as most users are already used to working with Microsoft applications. Not only does this save training costs but it also allows a higher user adoption and means employees can be up and working very quickly.

Work anywhere – Adopting cloud technology allows users to access all their files and applications no matter where they are (so long as they have an internet connection). This can help employees access their work when at home or on the road and can remove the need for remote login, VPN connections or the old-fashioned ‘email it to home’ to give staff increased flexibility and reassurance. Office 365 also allows users to install the Office suite on up to 15 devices (5 x smartphone, 5 x tablet and 5 x laptop) per user!

Always updated – Instead of purchasing the Microsoft Office suite and staying on that version, Office 365 gives you access to the latest version of Office. When a newer version of Office is released then Office 365 users immediately have access to this so they never have to upgrade or purchase the new version and can benefit from any new functionality - such as real-time co-authoring coming in Office 2016!

What next?

You can see how Office 365 works for you with this 30-day free trial (for up to 25 users) so you can start seeing how your business could benefit.